New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States

The Social Life of Forests The Social Life of Forests By Ferris Jabr Photographs by Brendan George Ko As a child, Suzanne Simard often roamed Canada’s old-growth forests with her siblings, building forts from fallen branches, foraging mushrooms and huckleberries and occasionally eating handfuls of dirt (she liked the taste). They’re Among the World’s Oldest Living Things. The Climate Crisis Is Killing Them. Sequoia Crest, Calif. — Until a few years ago, about the only thing that killed an old-growth giant sequoia was old age. Not only are they the biggest of the world’s trees, by volume — the General Sherman Tree, considered the largest, is 36 feet in diameter at its base and 275 feet tall — they are among the oldest. At least one fallen giant sequoia was estimated to have been more than 3,200 years old. They last so long that, historically, only one or two of every thousand old-growth trees dies annually, according to Nate Stephenson, a research ecologist for the United States Geological Survey.

Watching Earth Burn I have a pastime, one that used to give me considerable pleasure, but lately it has morphed into a source of anxiety, even horror: earth-watching. Let me explain. The earth from space is an incomparably lovely sight. I mean the whole planet, pole to pole, waxing and waning and rotating in that time-generating way it has, and not the views from the International Space Station, which is in a low orbit about 200 miles up and gives us only part of the whole.

New documentary about Canada's boreal forest reveals how it's in trouble, director says The director of a new documentary about Canada's boreal forest called Borealis says his team realized while making it that the iconic wilderness was in a lot of trouble — including in Alberta. "There's a big shot toward the end of the film where it's a drone shot that runs for like three minutes over Jasper National Park. And most of the trees are dead because of the mountain pine beetle," director Kevin McMahon told CBC Calgary's The Homestretch on Tuesday. Other parts of the forest, like around Grande Prairie, Alta., are also in trouble, he said — particularly because of drought. "We are collectively having a pretty considerable impact on the forest and Alberta is one of the places you can really see the evidence," said McMahon, whose film is a co-production between the company he co-founded, Primitive Entertainment, and the National Film Board of Canada. Canada's boreal forest is vast, stretching from coast to coast and covering some 270 million hectares.

Inside the C.I.A., She Became a Spy for Planet Earth Linda Zall played a starring role in American science that led to decades of major advances. But she never described her breakthroughs on television, or had books written about her, or received high scientific honors. One database of scientific publications lists her contributions as consisting of just three papers, with a conspicuous gap running from 1980 to 2020. The reason is that Dr. Some Ecological Damage from Trump's Rushed Border Wall Could Be Repaired The jagged granite peaks of Arizona’s Tinajas Altas Mountains, reminiscent of the Iron Throne in the television series Game of Thrones, are almost insurmountable to humans. But bighorn sheep have long climbed through them with ease—until their path was blocked by a 30-foot-high steel fence built atop a blasted-out right-of-way on the U.S.-Mexico border last spring. Just to the east, federal contractors have built more border fencing through the habitat of the endangered Sonoran pronghorn in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. And in South Texas, sections of wall continued to rise in protected areas of the Lower Rio Grande Valley in recent months, increasing flooding risks and bisecting the subtropical woodland habitat of endangered ocelots and jaguarundis and other imperiled species. These barriers are the climax of a three-year building spree designed to make good on former president Donald Trump’s promise to keep undocumented immigrants from crossing the southern U.S. border.

We’re Barely Listening to the U.S.’s Most Dangerous Volcanoes Take Hawaii as an example. Shortly after earthquakes picked up at the Kilauea volcano on April 30, 2018, scientists at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory could tell that they were not only increasing, but they were also propagating to the east. “That was not only cool, it was vital for emergency management,” Dr. Moran said. Scientists used those signals to project where magma might erupt, and planners evacuated residents in that area. The eruption destroyed more than 700 homes, but remarkably no one died.

Is this the end of forests as we've known them? Camille Stevens-Rumann never used to worry about seeing dead trees. As a wildland firefighter in the American west, she encountered untold numbers killed in blazes she helped to extinguish. She knew fires are integral to forests in this part of the world; they prune out smaller trees, giving room to the rest and even help the seeds of some species to germinate. Japan's recovery from tsunami disaster, by the numbers Japan's recovery from tsunami disaster, by the numbers By MARI YAMAGUCHI March 11, 2021 GMT TOKYO (AP) — Ten years after a massive earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan’s northeastern coast, triggering meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, much has been achieved in disaster-hit areas but they are still recovering. Numbers show how much progress has been made and what still remains.

Maps Show How Dramatically Fertilizer is Choking the Great Lakes The Great Lakes are turning into giant “dead zones” like the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. If we don’t change the way we grow food, we will destroy 1/5 of the world’s fresh surface water and all the fish in it. National Geographic just published a series of maps revealing the extent of the damage the Great Lakes have suffered from agricultural fertilizers, sewage waste water, warming temperatures and invasive species. The depressing images make it clear that our “civilized” lifestyles (primarily our unsustainable farming methods) are creating gigantic aquatic “dead zones” in not only our oceans, but our lakes as well. Dead zones are where oxygen levels are so low no aquatic life can survive. The five Great Lakes contain 1/5 of the world’s fresh surface water, what National Geographic calls “North America’s most valuable resource.”

Why a Climate-Denial Coalition May Be Cracking Apart If you read a lot of climate commentary, you may get the sense that the fossil-fuel industry, working essentially as a rogue actor, is singularly responsible for America’s lack of climate policy. This isn’t necessarily … wrong, but it’s not exactly correct either. Since the modern era of climate politics began, in 1988, the fossil-fuel industry has worked as a kind of political nexus, a place where lots of different interests—steelmaking, automaking, organized labor—come together to pursue the same goals. One of the best examples of this can be found in America’s freight-railroad industry.

Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand If you’re interested in the end of the world, you’re interested in New Zealand. If you’re interested in how our current cultural anxieties – climate catastrophe, decline of transatlantic political orders, resurgent nuclear terror – manifest themselves in apocalyptic visions, you’re interested in the place occupied by this distant archipelago of apparent peace and stability against the roiling unease of the day. If you’re interested in the end of the world, you would have been interested, soon after Donald Trump’s election as US president, to read a New York Times headline stating that Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook, considered New Zealand to be “the Future”.

Climate crisis has shifted the Earth’s axis, study shows The massive melting of glaciers as a result of global heating has caused marked shifts in the Earth’s axis of rotation since the 1990s, research has shown. It demonstrates the profound impact humans are having on the planet, scientists said. The planet’s geographic north and south poles are the point where its axis of rotation intersects the surface, but they are not fixed.